#stephen collis

How could he be sure they were bullet holes? He had certainly seen bullet holes before – there were plenty of shootings in La Ciudad – but never in sandstone. This seemed to make a difference. They were like potholes on a vertical street. Or craters on the moon. All splattered around the doorway. Clearly, someone or something in the door had been the target of a good deal of shooting. Men had died here, that was certain. On these very cobblestones. Died for words and their definitions. But their flesh and blood left no mark now. Only the bullets. Dio had read in a guidebook in his hotel room of another church – an ancient church from the thirteenth century – in which anarchists had piled up all the pews and lit a great fire. Apparently, you could still see the smoke-stains on the ceiling of the great vault. Dio wondered if he wanted to go see that, but couldn’t decide. Did one go see the marks left by revolutionary fires? Was that tourism? What sort of political meaning could reside in some marks left by smoke?

In his room Dio thought about travel and meeting people you would not meet had you not travelled, and about how a body could have its movements mapped and how those movements would be very prescribed and predictable for the most part: to work, to home, to work, to the store, to home, to work to pub to home. The daily fight for the the crude and material things of life. But then one travels to another land and the body experiences a sudden expansion towards refined and spiritual things and a line shoots out from home to airport to a place far off the map of the everyday, exploding the bounds of what had been known and assumed before, a radical shift in scale. He thought of the moment the plane turns slowly onto the runway and the pause there, and the sound of the engines and then the sudden roar and the G-forces pushing you into your seat. The moment you are hurtled off the map, looking at the strangers around you also being thrown off their maps, all of them just a little shocked or surprised or uncertain, their heads turning in unison towards the line of the horizon just barely visible through small windows on the sunny side of the plane.

…he could tell, or felt, that history was a great weight here and people came to look at history like some thing that had been propped up and tickets sold to go see it and he didn’t want any part of that, wasn’t even sure he wanted any part of the history he’d been asked to come all this way to witness – the history his father had asked him to go see because he was too old and sick himself to go, and his son Dio would go on his behalf and represent the family and stand in front of history like some propped-up bit of old architecture and remark and be remarked, pay respects and bury what had been until recently forgotten or not even known at all. Something that had been dug up and now needed a proper burial – if only to keep it buried once and for all.

What does it mean to feel your language is not your language?

…poets are always asked, infuriatingly, “but when are you going to write a novel?” the subtext being, “when are you going to grow up and write something people actually want read?” In fact, when a poet writes a novel, something desperate and unflattering has no doubt occurred, which the poet is likely to shamefacedly attempt to hide.

What comes first, the artistic representation of the revolution, or the revolution itself? I suspect it is merely a coincidence – but what an eerie coincidence it is. Of course there is no “depiction” of a revolution here: the revolution stops the story. It occurs somewhere outside representation, necessarily; but if we are to take it seriously, we need our art works to bring us oh-so-close, even if they can’t take us directly into the square where the uprising is occurring. Such a depiction awaits a different sort of author, a different moment of composition – one characterized by a liberty no one I know is yet privileged to enjoy.

Ravens hone tree sound from Gnomes home trail then Coloured graphs of Fukushima Tendrils crossing the Pacific warn Each step helicopters us closer To turn dumps to be ourselves Decaying animals the market Hands off every thing so let’s Opt out of opting out again And throw metallurgy after Scant agency or renewed animality Rattle cry bray at the dark edges Afire and together as trees shadows

Territory shadows helicopters Lines strewn shadows for Lines of piped fire fused Earth water stream bears The dead singing sad songs At abandoned mills still seen As somebody’s capital no not Some body but portfolio or like How the absence of money can be Bundled bought and sold as trees Shadow those bodies not bodies But ossifying metabolic structures housing Actual liquid moments of arboreal bliss